Nail biting, also known as onychophagy is an oralcompulsivehabit. It is a common stress-relieving habit. You may bite your nails in times of stress or excitement, or in times of boredom or inactivity. It can also be a learned behavior from family members.

For starters, biting your nails can raise the risk of catching a cold or other illness because you’re putting your unwashed hands in your mouth. It can also raise the risk of paronychia, or infection of the skin surrounding the nail, says Rochelle Torgerson, M.D., Ph.D., a dermatologist at the Mayo Clinic.

When you bite your nails, those bacteria end up in your mouth and gut, where they can cause gastro-intestinal infections that lead to diarrhea and abdominal pain.

Nail Biting usually starts at age 3 or 4, and 45% of adolescents are nail biters, but the prevalence of nail biting decreases as an individual ages. ( National Center for Biotechnology information).

However, for clients who bite their nails, the symptoms are easy to spot: nails tend to be abnormally short and uneven, cuticles may be absent or ragged, nail folds may be in varying stages of healing and splinter hemorrhages (longitudinal black thin lines in the nail that look like splinters) are often present says Stern, assistant clinical professor of dermatology at Mt. Sinai Medical Center

As a Salon we can offer a few options for nail biter:

– Apply short enhancements to help to break a habit,

– Apply a special coating, at My Nail Couture we use ORLY No Bite coating that has a bitter-flavored deterrent,

– Apply base coat, that rather think and makes it very difficult to bite. We’ve been successful in using Kodi and ANS base coat to break a nail biting habit of a client.